Non software fixes: find some mods in non US timezones: euros and asians/australians, to fight spam manually during sleepytime in the states.

Software fixes: - Posting limit for new users of 2 posts a day until cleared (see below) - New posts by new users need to be screened by level 2 mods (this could be anyone with over 800 or whatever number[ posts). - No hyperlinks in posts before clearance.

Unfortunately. this is a really hard one. Here are the "best" methods around these days:

- Hidden captcha field honeypots or negative-captcha. Only bots who scrape the HTML see these fields, and ether OCR or use a human farm to fill them. Anyone submitting with this field filled is a bot. See here for some explination and implimentation ideas: https://github.com/subwindow/negative-captcha

- Domain specific captcha. Have sets of rock climbing specific questions/answers to vet accounts. People who rock climb should know the answers, or be able to find them quickly via google. Bots are lost and human farms are much less reliable. The down here is alienating new climbers or people who are not native English speakers who many not know the answer or be able to find it easily.

- Manual admin verification/approval for every new account. It's not automated, but it will stop most spam right at the gate.

Right now we have no dev/staging server, so we went with manually validating new users as a band-aid, non-scalable solution, but once we get the servers setup a bit better I'll be exploring the possibilities more here.

Or, if you can code, if a user copies and pastes the same data into the title and/or body of a thread or even a PM, over a certain period of time (good indicator of SPAM), that user's ability to "submit" should be temp-locked until validated not SPAM. This would very quickly stop someone from flooding threads and/or PMs with SPAM automatically.